Zerotech Dobby

The Zerotech Dobby is a toy drone designed with selfies in mind, but it's expensive and doesn't fly for long.

The Zerotech Dobby is a toy drone designed with selfies in mind, but it's expensive and doesn't fly for long.

Dec. 5, 2016Jim Fisher

Let's make one thing clear: For the $399 asking price of the Zerotech Dobby, you can get pretty close to buying our Editors' Choice budget drone, the DJI Phantom 3 Standard. The Phantom is a powerful tool for aerial videography that has no problems ascending to high altitudes, moving quickly, and recording perfectly stable video. The Dobby is a low-altitude quadcopter that lumbers through the air, recording wobbly 1080p footage, and only managing to do so for about six minutes before landing. It's an expensive toy, but if you want a drone small enough to fit in a jacket pocket and can follow you around snapping selfies for a few minutes, you may find it to be an enjoyable one.

Design and Controls

The Dobby has a folding design and is finished in white. It measures just 1.5 by 2.6 by 5.3 inches (HWD) when folded and weighs just 7 ounces. That's less than 500 grams, so you don't need to register with the FAA before you take it out for a flight.

The four arms fold out for flight, and have folding rotors attached. Once you've gone through the initial pairing process with your smartphone, you can get the Dobby up in the air in a matter of minutes.

There's no dedicated remote control. Instead you fly using your smartphone. The free Do.fun app, available for Android and iOS, is required to control the quadcopter. Firmware updates are also performed via the app. The Dobby sports 16GB of internal memory and a standard micro USB port. It's an Android device, so you can plug the quadcopter directly into your computer and transfer files via the Android File Transfer application to offload videos and stills for editing.

The battery installs in the bottom of the Dobby. It clips in with ease, and provides about six minutes of flight on a full charge. One battery is included, along with a charging dock with a USB-C connection and an AC adapter. A bundle with a second battery and a spare set of propellers sells for $469. It takes about a half hour to fully charge a depleted battery.

The Dobby is pretty easy to fly. It automatically takes off from flat ground—don't try from a stony driveway or a grassy lawn, however, as the rotors are too low to the ground to spin up on anything but a flat surface. Takeoff and landing are automatic, but you may have to calibrate the aircraft compass and the phone compass before your first flight. The app walks you through that process, which involves spinning the Dobby and waving your phone in a figure-eight pattern.

There are two control schemes available. Selfie mode adjusts the directions in relation to your position. It can also be set to a landscape videography mode, which flies the drone in relation to the position of its nose.

A control pad on the left side of the app adjusts altitude and spins the Dobby about its axis. To move it forward, backward, left, or right in space you hold your thumb down on the right half of the screen and tilt your phone in the direction you want it to fly.

There are a few automated flight modes. You can set it to orbit around a point in space, keeping its camera pointed at the center. It also has Target and Face Tracking, perfect for the selfie crowd—target yourself and the Dobby will follow you around. Finally there's Return-to-Home, which brings the quadcopter back to its launch point.

Performance and Video Quality

Despite its small size, the Dobby is slow and lumbering in the air. You'd expect it to fly nimbly and quickly given its size, but the propellers just aren't strong enough to make it a candidate for the drone race circuit. Look at something like the Blade QX2 Nano if you're more interested in speed than aerial narcissism.

Video is recorded at 1080p quality. It's silent, which is fine as propeller noise is all a microphone would pick up. Stabilization is digital, and the result is wobbly, jittery video. Colors look good, but I've seen better detail from 1080p video before—this is far from my first choice for aerial videography.

Stills are captured in JPG format at 13MP resolution. Image quality is on par with what you get from a midrange smartphone. But if you're used to Snapchatting with your phone's front camera you'll be happy with the Dobby's imaging capabilities. Just don't expect anything more. If you want a compact drone in order to capture stunning high-altitude aerial images and videos, the DJI Mavic Pro is easily your best choice. It's more expensive than the Dobby, however.

Conclusions

If you want an aerial selfie drone and you've got money to burn, the Zerotech Dobby has its merits. It's easy enough to fly, and very, very small. If quality is your main concern, consider the DJI Mavic Pro instead; you'll pay a premium for its small size, but find that it's nearly as capable as a larger model like Phantom 4. Our favorite low-cost drone is the Phantom 3 Standard, which isn't nearly as portable as the Dobby, but captures clear, stable video at up to 2.7K quality.

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About the Author

Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007.

He honed his writing skills at retailer B&H Photo, where he wrote thousands upon thousands of product descriptions, blog posts, and reviews. Since then he's shot with hundreds of camera models, ranging from pocket point-and-shoots to medium format digital cameras. And he's reviewed almost all of them. When he's not testing cameras and gear for PCMag, he's likely out and about shooting with ... See Full Bio